Chamber and committees

We had our first meeting yesterday. As well as setting out our terms of reference, we got into discussions about delivering everyone’s priorities and responsibilities in the climate change plan. That group will be one of the mechanisms, but I will also have regular bilateral meetings with my colleagues. In a 90-minute or two-hour meeting of the delivery group, we will not be able to cover everything, but that group brings everyone together. There will be certain points at which the delivery group will look at particular aspects. I have all my officials, including my director general, who is overseeing the whole process.

The delivery group will be critical, and I am feeling very positive about it after yesterday's first meeting, because everyone was in a very can-do space.

I will briefly take you through what has happened following the pilot. There was a pilot in 2024, there was an independent peer review, and then net zero assessment was rolled out across the whole of Government, including agencies such as Transport Scotland and Scottish Forestry. That happened in April.

The emissions from those policies and actions will contribute to our pathway. The details of the emissions impact of the Scottish budget will then be included in the high-level carbon budget assessment. A central team has been established to co-ordinate the net zero assessments across Government.

I will hand over to Phil Raines, because he is pivotal to this work. What assessment of the pilot are you looking for that you think is not there? We had the pilot, learned the lessons and rolled net zero assessment out. I would be interested to know what more information you might need.

Do you mean before a decision has been made by a minister?

I am happy to give you the information that you need in order to scrutinise my decisions.

Next month, we will be doing a six-month review of the net zero assessments, which will inform some of the information that we give the committee in spring. A year from now, Phil Raines and I will be able to go through some of the things that we have tweaked and changed—it has to be working for us and adding value to what we are doing.

It gives ministers and the Cabinet the tools to make decisions. As I said, we are reviewing the process, because we constantly want to improve it.

We think that it will be manageable and that it is important. Policies will not rush at us in a massive glut all at once. The Government is preparing to carry out the assessments as policies are brought forward. We have been carrying out the assessments for only a few months, and we will always keep a watching brief on how things are going. As I said, we will carry out an assessment after the first year, and we will give the committee information on how that assessment has gone.

The Government constantly considers the resources that are applied to things, whether the outcomes associated with those things are worth while and whether we should make any tweaks to processes.

Give us a year and I will be able to say how burdensome the work has been. It might not be that burdensome—when we look back on it, we might think that the net zero assessments have been a game changer in giving ministers an appreciation of how policies will affect our drive to net zero. It is possible that things will surprise us in the assessments. We might get a little more bang for our buck from certain policies, with the assessments suggesting that they might be a lot better than we had predicted, so we might decide to put more money into policies that will help us to achieve other outcomes as well as the initial outcome that we wanted to achieve. The analysis after the first year of the roll-out will be really important in helping us to make decisions about where we go next with our work and whether we should tweak things.

I hope that it is not misleading. If it is misleading the public, it is misleading me and the Government. It must be as accurate as possible. I said at the start that it is not an exact science. There is no perfect blueprint out there that we can take off the shelf and apply. Only a handful of Governments are doing such work. I rattled off a couple of examples, but I do not know what detail those Governments go into compared with us. It is not an exact science. We need to constantly ask ourselves the question that you asked.

I do not think that the public would be interested in the nuts and bolts of the taxonomy process that goes on behind the scenes in the Scottish Government, but the narrative is important. When I mention figures such as £5 billion or X amount associated with transport, it is important to be able to point to tangible policies that that is mapped to.

As ever, Phil Raines will be able to provide more detail.

I do not know how that would work. Thinking about it instinctively, projects will happen at different times, so how could they be grouped together?

That is the aim. We are at the start of the process, and it is not an exact science. We wanted to start by setting out the climate narrative. The committee has taken evidence from a number of people who have views on the narrative and suggestions for improvements, and we welcome those. We are doing this exercise for a reason, and there is always more work to do in this space. We are one of the few Governments doing such work. There are some other countries that produce climate narratives along with their budget, but they are few and far between. I think that France and Austria do, as well as us.

We have an opportunity to lead the way, but there is also the scope for us to continually improve. We are considering how we can use the climate change narrative of the Scottish budget to identify examples of funding that has been committed to key climate change and SNAP policies. We are reviewing the taxonomy system so that it can be applied and can provide more useful analysis as we go. I outlined some of that in my response to the letter that the committee wrote to me.

It is right that we review the taxonomy system. I might need to check my recollection—I am looking at Phil Raines here—but I think that, when we started in 2018, we included only capital spending, and then we decided to include resource spending as well. We are constantly widening it out.

I think that the taxonomy is helpful. First of all, it is helpful to ministers as they make decisions about spend. That is one of the main reasons for it. We need to ensure that the money that we put into certain policies works hard for us. We have stretching ambitions—we have the first carbon budget to meet, as well as the 2045 net zero target—so it is only right that we have the tools that are necessary for us to analyse where we are putting our money.

There are a number of other things that we need to get better and better at, and one is about looking at the cost benefits of policies. There are a number of areas, which people will have heard me talk about many times, where the policy and spend might be located in the climate action portfolio but the benefits appear in relation to people’s health outcomes. With a policy related to air pollution, for example, the benefits might not arise immediately but over the longer term, and we might be able to trace them back to decisions that were made in the climate action space. We are in the foothills of that kind of analysis, and the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute gave us a great deal of help on that when we were putting the climate change plan together.

The taxonomy is one thing—it is really helpful for us when we are analysing climate spend across all areas, or particular areas, of Government spend—but we have to take other mechanisms and considerations into account, and we are in the early stages of that process. It is such a useful discussion to have, and I commend the committee for the work that it has done on getting feedback, because whether the climate narrative has been useful and how it can improve are matters that we are absolutely alive to.